_Apart from allocating truly substantial resources, revitalising the higher education sector so that it can be the foundation of an Australian society based on knowledge and learning will involve unprecedented political will.

Sir Humphrey: Bernard, there are four words you have to work into a proposal if you want a Minister to accept it.

Sir Frank: Quick, simple, popular, cheap. And equally there are four words to be included in a proposal if you want it thrown out.

Sir Humphrey: Complicated, lengthy, expensive, controversial. And if you want to be really sure that the Minister doesn't accept it you must say the decision is courageous.

Bernard: And that's worse than controversial?

Sir Humphrey: Controversial only means this will lose you votes, courageous means this will lose you the election.

Recently, Former Labor Senator and cabinet minister John Button gave a telling interview to Jan McGuinness writing for a house journal . She quotes him as saying that these days "politicians are all in a frenzy with mobile phones stuck to their ears. But on the outside [of the political arena] people don't understand and aren't interested, and I think now I'm in that second category. I understand it but I don't appreciate it a bit... The Canberra centricity thing is a terrible burden for this country." McGuinness then writes, "He believes there are too many 'witless' men and women on the main stage. 'People run away from ideas with the result that we have this technocratic class on both sides of politics who are probably highly skilled at assessing opinion poles but who are looking over their shoulders all the time... Certainly in my time in politics there were brighter people prepared to take risk. It might be a geriatric remark, but it's essentially true... It used to be clever politics. Now they just whinge about each other and say the obvious.' "  Finally, McGuinness quotes the former senator in saying that the public service which could boast "mandarins" such as Sir Arthur Tange, Fred Wheeler and H. C. Coombes (who refused every post-nominal offered him) is now shattered and there's no corporate memory. It's a damning assessment from a guy who pretty well used to tell it like it was. He still is.

Two years ago, February 10, 2000, Sydney Morning Herald senior writer Paul Sheehan wrote:

[W]hen structural reform does inevitably come to the tertiary education sector it could end up looking similar to the system that existed before the Dawkins explosion: a mixture of elite institutions, specialist regional universities, and vocational colleges meeting industry demands.

In the meantime, the Minister for Education [David Kemp] is demonised, the shadow education minister [Michael Lee] howls at the moon, the research sector grows more threadbare, the Young Australian Scientist of the Year [Dr Kirsten Benkendorff] could not get a job for a year, and a state of churlish inertia is triumphant.

With the passage of time, Michael Lee has lost his seat, David Kemp has been moved to the environment portfolio to be replaced by Brendan Nelson, and the system gives every appearance of swimming through glue. The fact is that to redifferentiate our 38 public universities so that we would no longer have the millstone of the homogeneous mass that resulted from the Dawkins disaster seems to have been much too courageous a undertaking to implement. Interestingly the Canadian Liberal government seems to be achieving the goal in dealing with its 63 universities through a combined approach of vastly increasing resources for research, development, innovation and the higher education sector while channeling those resources selectively.
    Not unexpectedly the approach doesn't meet with everyone's approval. On the one hand leading Canadian academic administrators praise the initiative going so far as to hail it as the government's "crowning achievement" while others contend "the government is purchasing excellence for a few at the expense of the majority of institutions, faculty, and students." Simply stated the government is deliberately discriminating in the belief that in so doing Canada will get that best value for its investment. However, it is not a matter of cutting institutions' water off per se.

Three programs are at the forefront of Canada's drive to "place our country among the most innovative nations in the world by 2010." as Alan Rock the Minister for Industry had put it. First, there is the $600 million Canada Research Chairs program which was created to stem an ostensible brain drain to the United States and Europe. In the February 1^st issue of Science  Wayne Kondro summarised the course of events under the header

New programs are pumping more than a billion dollars into academic research. But a relative handful of universities are getting most of the money

To emphasise the point that's A$1.3 billion on a per capita basis for academic research. Robert Birgeneau decided 18 months ago to leave a deanship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to become president of the University of Toronto (UT). Kondro write, "Born and educated in Canada, Birgeneau... was attracted by the opportunity to compete for billions of dollars that the government is shoveling into targeted programs aimed at creating an MIT or two north of the 49th parallel. But although Birgeneau and other top academic administrators praise the new programs as a 'crowning achievement' of the current Liberal government, some educators worry that the government is purchasing excellence for a few at the expense of the majority of institutions, faculty, and students." And there can no doubt that the Canadian government has made a courageous decision to allocate resources discriminately. For example, of the almost 2000 research professorships being funded by the government 15 of the 63 eligible universities will receive 1400 of them. To compare our 38 public universities with the 63 eligible Canadian schools the Australian government would fund 1190 research chairs of which 843 would go to 9 or 10 of our universities. Furthering the discriminatory approach the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) has awarded in its initial run of grants A$1.05 billion of which the same fifteen schools receive A$700 million. On present behavior, and following on from the disaster perpetrated by John Dawkins those programs would be seem by both the Coalition and Labor as being foolhardy as in Sir Humphrey's use of the term "courageous".

And yet Canada sees it as necessary for "Drawing Back the Talent" as Nature heads its February 14^th section on the Canadian initiatives. So for example, following postdocs at the University of Basel and MIT, Michele Loewen returned to Canada last year. A full-time job in a government-funded lab, with access to a new national synchrotron was the lure. Her appointment to Saskatoon's Plant Biotechnology Institute demonstrates the productive interrelationship between Canada's National Research Council (NRC), which runs the institute, and CFI, which funds science-infrastructure improvements such as the University of Saskatchewan's Canadian Light Source, a national synchrotron facility under construction in Saskatoon.
    Nature points out, "One reason that scientists, especially young ones, leave in the first place is because the pay does not match up -- especially against top university posts in the United States and industry jobs in the United States, Europe and Japan." If anything the situation is even more pressing for Australia. But the Canadian government has set up through CFI the New Opportunities Fund, to address the imbalance. It is supplementing the salaries and lab budgets of newly hired faculty at Canadian universities. Since 1998, the programme has helped to hire over 1,000 scholars, and according to Nature, "many... would probably have left otherwise." The subsidies are sufficient to make up the difference between US and Canadian remuneration, and they are sufficiently long term to attract back drained brains.
    The Canada Research Chairs program is taking the same approach to recruitment and retention, but at a more senior level. The government program will have funded 2,000 positions in Canadian institutions by 2005. And there is nothing short term about the funding set aside for these research chairs; the  appointments last for seven years, and are renewable for another seven after that, a far cry from what Backing Australia's Ability is set to offer.  As one researcher lured back from the US said, "You can imagine the amount of freedom that's giving me, and I feel that I'm at the right stage of my career to exercise a certain amount of leadership that can help a lot of the younger faculty."

Over the past year it has become increasingly apparent that neither the Australian government nor the Labor opposition have an understanding of the initiatives being undertaken by countries such as Canada and Ireland in order to develop and maintain a sound foundation for being internationally competitive. Apart from anything else, they stand to gain in attracting the brightest of young Australian academics and researches either directly or in enticing Australian expatriates who decide that the US lifestyle isn't for them.

Alex Reisner
The Funneled Web